Involving External Stakeholders in Project Courses

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties. Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders. Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses. Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction...Comment: Abstract shortened since arxiv.org limits length of abstracts. See paper/pdf for full abstract. Paper is forthcoming, accepted August 2017. Arxiv version 2 corrects misspelled author nam

Agile practices adoption with Lean in growing entrepreneur companies

Abstract. There are three popular terms in the software development industry recently, they are Agile, Lean and Entrepreneurs. Agile is an approach in which requirements and solutions for the products evolve through short cycles. Entrepreneur can be defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business based on potential opportunities and often is a small business. In recent years, entrepreneurs firms follow Lean concepts in Information Technology industry are trying to adopt Agile methodologies because they believe it helps them to avoid failures and grow faster. However, when growing they often face problems to maintain the agility which they have when they were smaller. The aim of this study is to find out approaches and lessons which can be used to adopt Agile practices in young expanding firms. In addition, those methods were compared to those from large-scale Agile frameworks to give conclusions on adoption approaches. Three interviews were conducted with the high-level managers of target case companies and two of them based in Oulu, Finland and one located in Hanoi, Vietnam. All of the companies which joined the research are working software development area but each of them has a different pathway and side services. They also share are similar numbers of employees above 9 and smaller than 30, which is the reason that they were chosen. Another reason for this selection is that all of them called themselves a Lean start-up or following core concepts of it. On another hand, large-scale Agile frameworks were introduced as an approach for big organizations to adopt Agile practices. In this research, lessons from those frameworks were proposed as suggestions and a new point of view for maintaining agility. The results of the research can be concluded that focusing on customer requirements, forming small Agile teams and giving more freedom to members are three practices that companies in the interview are using. Furthermore, from designed frameworks, it showed that having dynamic teams, enhancing the value of each iteration and improving the training process are ways to improve the adoption process in large firms

Is Knowledge transfer an obstacle? A post pandemic study of the challenges and proposing strategies to improve efficiency in distributed IS projects

Knowledge transfer (or sharing) has always been crucial within the dispersed teams’ structure. As we are moving into post-Covid 19 pandemic times where the norms of working are being redefined, there becomes a need to revisit this area and examine the working collaboration of the teams for meeting clients’ expectations, as there have been only few attempts undertaken after the pandemic. This study is based on interviewing 18 IT practitioners and professionals, further support by thematic analysis of data collected. The findings determined that for efficient knowledge transfer process ‘sustaining coordination’ is the core phenomenon together with having ‘closed feedback loops, exchanging particulars and logs timely, dynamic reporting and building teams capacity’ as sub-cores. The key observations identified from the results of this study were mainly the inclusion of several non-technical components which have now become essential, and back and forth support knowledge sharing in the distributed IS projects for productivity and completing tasks

Pmo Lite for Colorado Housing and Finance Authority

The focus of this professional project was to identify the appropriate services for a lightweight project management office (PMO) to implement at a company referred to with the alias Not-For-Profit Organization (NFPO), and then to complete the first phase of this implementation. NFPO had lower project success rates than desired. They wanted to integrate project management practices into their organization in order to be more effective in meeting their mission. In order to determine the best approach to do this, lightweight and heavyweight project management methodologies and PMOs were examined. Based on NFPO\u27s smaller staff size, their culture, managements\u27 desire to keep overhead low, and their low project management maturity state, a lightweight PMO (PMO Lite) with a supportive nature was tailored for NFPO\u27s needs. This paper presents the results of the first phase of the PMO Lite implementation, which was to implement PMO Lite within the IT division. The next phase planned was to implement PMO Lite company-wide. For the first phase a PMO Lite Project Charter was completed. This document defined the goals and objectives, as well as high level responsibilities and resources for the PMO. A primary service of the PMO was to manage a project management methodology. Next, a simple project management methodology was developed to eventually be used organization-wide for all projects. It incorporated Scrum in a separate project management methodology for the IT application development projects. Document templates and a central document repository were created. IT staff were trained on these methodologies. A business case for NFPO\u27s PMO Lite was presented. The early results of the implementation were favorable. They included executive support of the PMO, IT staff trained on the project management methodologies, and the successful completion of two Scrum projects